I stood in front of my closet for a solid ten minutes trying to solve a problem that shouldn’t have required this much thought.
What do you wear to a not-date with your professor?
That was the actual, literal question I was asking myself, out loud, to an empty apartment, like saying it aloud might make it sound less insane than it did in my head. It was dinner. With a friend. She’d said so herself, twice, with the confidence of someone daring me to disagree.
I had two shirts that qualified as formal. I put one on, then the other, then went back to the first. Took it off. Put it back on. Told myself I was being ridiculous, then spent another four minutes deciding between two nearly identical pairs of dark jeans like the outcome of the evening hinged on it.
I settled on the second shirt, the better jeans, and a jacket I usually saved for the rare occasion that required looking like a functioning adult. Somewhere in the middle of all that, it occurred to me that I had no idea what she’d be wearing, which was a genuinely unhelpful thought to have while getting dressed, and yet there it was, uninvited, running through my head anyway.
Something sophisticated, probably. She struck me as a woman who didn’t own a single wrinkled piece of clothing. Tailored. Understated. The kind of outfit that looked simple right up until you noticed the fabric, or the fit, or some small detail that told you it cost more than it looked like it should.
My phone buzzed on the counter.
Nicole: Skyline. Rooftop. 8.
I looked it up. Then looked again, because the first search result made me question whether I’d typed it wrong.
I hadn’t.
Skyline was a rooftop wine bar downtown. The kind of place where nobody was in a suit, exactly, but everyone still looked like they knew something you didn’t. I’d driven past it exactly once, on the way to somewhere else, and made a mental note never to go in.
Apparently that note had expired.
I got in my car at 7:40, still turning over the sophisticated-outfit theory in my head the entire drive, half-convinced I was going to walk in looking like I’d wandered in from the wrong zip code.
I found parking two blocks out — nothing closer, unsurprisingly — and made the walk over with ten minutes to spare. Rather than go in and stand around alone looking for a table, I decided to wait outside, leaning against the low wall near the entrance, watching the kind of foot traffic that belonged to a place like this. Heels. Blazers. A couple arguing quietly about a reservation. Someone’s very small, very expensive-looking dog.
I checked the time. 7:56.
A cab pulled up.
I didn’t think much of it — cabs pulled up outside places like this constantly — until the door opened, and she got out.
I did not guess right.
Black shirt, fitted enough to look effortless instead of tight. A dark blue jacket over it. No necklace, no chain at her throat, just skin, which somehow drew more attention than jewelry would have. A denim skirt in the same dark blue, thigh-high, fitted, with a silver chain-link detail catching the rooftop lights every time she moved. Black platform boots that added a few inches she clearly didn’t need to already command a room.
Nothing about it read sophisticated, not in the way I’d spent the last hour imagining. It read like she’d gotten dressed for herself and let everyone else deal with the consequences.
I already knew she was beautiful. Had known since the rain. She was no doubt an easy ten on the scale.
And yet, somehow, this broke the scale.
She spotted me, smiled, and walked straight up to me, stopping close enough that I had to actually look at her instead of just in her general direction. She clasped her hands behind her back and rocked slightly onto her heels.
"So." A small, deliberate pause. "How do I look?"
I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. Not a word, not a sound. My brain had apparently rerouted all available processing power toward the very pressing task of not staring, and failed spectacularly at that too.
She tilted her head, entirely too pleased with the silence she’d caused. "Did I break your brain?"
"...A little."
"Just a little?"
"I’m recalibrating."
"Take your time." She said it like she had all night to watch me fail at basic sentence construction.
I cleared my throat, forced my brain back online, and landed on the only line I had left in stock.
"A solid six."
She laughed. Bright, immediate, entirely unbothered by how badly that had undersold the actual situation. "High praise."
"I try."
She looked me over — slow, unhurried, clearly enjoying herself — and smiled. "Did you wait long?"
"Ten minutes. Give or take."
"Come on. Let’s get you a drink for the trouble." She grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward the entrance without waiting to see if I’d follow.
I followed. Right up to a host stand at the base of the elevator, where a woman in black gave Nicole one look, smiled like she recognized her, and simply said, "Right this way, Ms. Collins," no reservation name required, no list checked.
I filed that away as one more thing I apparently didn’t have the full picture on yet. Right underneath the fact that she still hadn’t let go of my wrist.
The place opened up past the host stand into warm, low light. String bulbs strung overhead, candles on every table, the whole skyline laid out beyond a low glass railing like it had been ordered specifically for the view. Quiet enough to talk. Loud enough that nobody could overhear if you didn’t want them to.
"What are you having?" she asked, already scanning the drink list.
I glanced at my own menu. Wine names I didn’t recognize, paired with descriptions that told me absolutely nothing useful, and, true to form, no prices anywhere.
"Surprise me."
Which was English for ’I have no idea what any of this means and I’m not about to admit that out loud.’
She looked up at me, something amused flickering behind her eyes, like she’d translated the sentence perfectly and decided to be kind about it.
"Two of the Barolo," she told the bartender, without missing a beat.
We got our drinks and found a table near the railing; low seating, close together, the skyline glittering behind her like she’d planned that too. She settled in across from me, one leg crossed over the other, and angled herself so she was looking straight at me instead of out at the view everyone else had come here for.
"So," she said, swirling her glass once. "Tell me something about you I don’t already know."
"You’ve read my file."
"Files don’t tell you anything real."
"They told you my GPA, my study hours, and my seating habits. Feels pretty real to me."
She rolled her eyes. "Fine." She set her glass down properly this time, leaning in a fraction. "Do you have a girlfriend?"
"Would you let me go home if I said yes?"
It came out lighter than I meant it to. The same register I hadn’t used since that first rainy afternoon, before I knew who she was and had any reason to be careful about it.
"I’ll take that as a no." She said it happily, like she’d already known the answer and was only asking to hear me confirm it out loud.
I didn’t confirm it.
"I’m also single," she added.
"I can tell."
That got a small, satisfied smirk out of her.
I took a sip of my drink, mostly to have something to do with my hands. She was still watching me, still smiling, completely unbothered by the silence.
"You really like me, don’t you?"
"A lot."
"You’re not even going to play hard to get."
"Nope."
I turned my glass slowly on the table, trying to figure out if there was anything I could say that would actually rattle her, even a little. I decided to try the closest thing I had to a warning.
"I might take advantage of you."
"You can try."
I paused.
That landed nothing like I’d intended. If anything, she looked more entertained now than she had a second ago, like I’d handed her a challenge instead of a threat.
She smirked. "Do you want to try?"
I blinked.
"Wow. You’re so—" I stopped, searching for the word.
"Direct?"
"Extremely so."
She laughed, entirely pleased with herself, and I found myself smiling back despite every effort not to.
I stared at her for a while, and somewhere in that stare I made a decision I probably wasn’t going to think through properly until much later: just have fun tonight. Forget the terms, forget the professor thing, forget every reason I’d had to be careful, at least for the next hour.
"So. Professor at twenty-eight." I turned my glass again, working through it out loud. "I also heard you worked a year in the industry. The timeline isn’t mathing."
"It maths fine. You’re just doing it slowly."
"Educate me, then."
She smiled and settled back into her seat like she’d been waiting for someone to ask.
"B.Eng, seventeen to twenty-one. Standard. Then a year interning in automotive engineering, twenty-one to twenty-two, before I went back for my Master’s."
"That’s already fast."
"I wasn’t done. Master’s, two years. Then the PhD."
"Which took—"
"Three years."
I stopped mid-sip. "Three?"
"Three." She said it plainly, like it wasn’t a genuinely absurd number, like most people didn’t take twice that long and still finish exhausted. "I had good funding, a demanding advisor, and absolutely nothing else pulling my attention."
"So twenty-seven, and you’re already done with a PhD most people don’t finish before thirty."
"Twenty-seven, yes. Then another year in industry, properly this time, not an internship. Then Camden Hale offered me a position, and here we are." She spread her hands slightly, like the whole thing was obvious in hindsight. "Twenty-eight."
I sat there doing the math again anyway, mostly because some part of me was hoping it would come out less impressive the second time.
It didn’t.
"That’s insane."
"I get bored easily."
I raised an eyebrow.
"Don’t worry," she said, immediately, like she’d already known exactly where that eyebrow was headed. "I’ll never get bored of you."
Something tightened in my chest before I could stop it.
"You’re not going to make this easy, are you?"
She laughed again, and I noticed — really noticed, the way you notice something you weren’t expecting to — that she looked genuinely happy just sitting there, talking through her own history with me like it was nothing special, like this was just an ordinary conversation and not her casually detailing one of the most accelerated careers I’d ever heard of in person.
She wasn’t performing right now. She wasn’t teasing, or pouting, or negotiating. She was just talking. And somehow that version of her was more unsettling than every version I’d met so far.